What I Learned Building Websites for the Public Sector

For a freelancer, "trusted by the NHS" is the kind of line that makes people look twice. And honestly, it should. Public sector and health work comes with a level of scrutiny that most commercial projects just never reach.

Over the years I've worked on sites connected to the NHS, King's College London and the University of Edinburgh, including the Healthier You diabetes prevention programme run by Reed Wellbeing. I learned a lot from that work. Some of it the hard way. Here's the stuff that doesn't really show up in a portfolio screenshot.

Accessibility isn't a feature, it's just the starting point

On a lot of commercial sites, accessibility gets treated as a nice-to-have. Something to sort out later, if there's time and budget. In the public sector that idea doesn't fly, and I'm glad it doesn't.

A site like the Healthier You programme has to work for everyone. Someone using a screen reader. Someone on a five-year-old phone. Someone with low vision, or navigating entirely by keyboard, or trying to load the page on a patchy connection. You can't design for an imaginary person on a fast laptop in a nice office. You have to design for the person who actually needs the thing most.

So WCAG stops being a box I tick at the end and starts shaping decisions from the very first wireframe. Semantic HTML, proper heading structure, real colour contrast, clear form labels, a sensible focus order. The honest upside is that building this way makes every site better. The habits I picked up doing health work are the same ones I now bring to every single project, whether the client is the NHS or a local landscaper.

When the content is about someone's health, everything feels different

There's a real gap between a site that sells a product and a site that helps someone work out whether they're at risk of Type 2 diabetes. With Healthier You, the content carries actual weight. People make decisions about their health based on what they read and how easily they can act on it.

That changed how I thought about pretty much everything. Plain language matters more. The journey from "I'm a bit worried about this" to "right, I've checked my risk" has to be obvious and quick. A confusing layout isn't just annoying here. It's a barrier sitting between a real person and a free NHS service that might genuinely help them. That's a heavy thing to keep in mind, and it should be.

Speed isn't just an SEO thing

It's easy to think of site speed as a technical detail, or something you chase for Google. In this world it's neither. It's about who you actually reach.

Not everyone has fast broadband and the latest phone. A slow, bloated site quietly shuts out the very people a public health programme most needs to get to. So all the usual stuff I care about anyway, clean code, optimised images, lightweight pages, sensible font loading, matters even more. Fast isn't a luxury here. It's part of making sure the service is available to everyone it was built for.

You can't just tell people to trust you

Trust on a health site isn't something you declare. People feel it, or they don't, and it comes down to the details. A calm, uncluttered layout. Real stories from real people instead of stock-photo smiles. Honest numbers. No dark patterns, no nudging people into things. On Healthier You that meant letting the actual results do the talking, like the 97% who said it helped them improve their diet, rather than dressing it up in marketing language.

Working inside an organisation like Reed Wellbeing, delivering an NHS programme, also means working to their standards and their sign-off process. I'll be honest, that's good for you as a designer. It forces a standard you don't always get on smaller jobs. Nothing ships on a whim.

What any of this means if you're thinking of hiring me

Look, most businesses don't need WCAG-grade rigour or a public-sector sign-off process. That's fine. But here's the thing I keep coming back to: the standards I picked up doing that work don't get switched off for a smaller project. The same care goes into a local business site as goes into a national health programme. Accessible, fast, clear, honest. That's just how I build now.

That's really the benefit of hiring a freelance web designer who's done this kind of work. You're not getting someone building to the bare minimum. You're getting someone whose normal was set by some of the toughest clients there are.

If you've got a project in mind, commercial or public sector, and you want it built to that standard, let's have a chat.